Basic Attention Token (BAT)
Basics * From Token Tuesdays (15-10-2019): "A digital currency used to incentivize the viewing of advertisements. Ads on Brave are opt-in, meaning that you only have to view them if you so choose. Better yet, if you do view an ad, you’re rewarded in the form of Basic Attention Tokens." * Brave browser was launched in June of 2016 with support for BAT being integrated in the latter half of 2017. * The token used by the open source, privacy centered and attention based project, called The Brave Browser. * “From the creator of JavaScript and the co-founder of Mozilla and Firefox, with a solid team – funded by Founders Fund, Foundation Capital, Propel Venture Partners, Pantera Capital, DCG, Danhua Capital, and Huiyin Blockchain Venture among others.” * Is a fork of the Google Chromium project. * “Basic Attention Token radically improves the efficiency of digital advertising by creating a new token that can be exchanged between publishers, advertisers, and users. It all happens on the Ethereum blockchain. * The token can be used to obtain a variety of advertising and attention-based services on the Brave platform. The utility of the token is based on user attention, which simply means a person’s focused mental engagement.” * Brave will be using (21-9-2018) blockchain identity startup Civic’s verification services to ensure publishers are paid for their content with its token. ICO * From Token Tuesdays (15-10-2019): "Seeing as the Brave founders brought an extensive amount of reputable experience to the table, the BAT token sale went on to be one of the more prominent ICOs in 2017. On May 31st, 1 billion BAT tokens were sold to a combination of public and private investors while another 500 million BAT was allocated towards the company. The project raised an estimated $36M with participation from distinguished funds such as 1confirmation, Pantera Capital, and Digital Currency Group (DCG). It is important to note that 300 million of that 500 million BAT allocated for the company is set aside for a user growth pool. According to the whitepaper, the endowment will be used to reward early adopters of the Brave browser and to reward participation in the BAT ecosystem. Any unused BAT after an extended period of time is sent back to the user growth fund to be redistributed at any point in the future. Once the growth pool is exhausted, no new tokens will be created." Token * From their website: " It is a utility token based on the Ethereum technology that can also be used as a unit of account between advertisers, publishers, and users in our new, blockchain-based digital advertising and services platform." * From Token Tuesdays (15-10-2019): "As it stands today, there are currently no holding or staking mechanisms in place for the underlying Brave Reward system itself. Similarly, there are no existing burn mechanisms and while the growth pool provides a strong foundation for adoption in the next few years, it’s unclear how the ecosystem would attract new users in the event that all growth tokens were distributed." * Says all their tips will be anonymous: "All Brave Rewards analysis is done without disclosing your identity. The analysis is carried out on-device via statistical voting and over the network via the open source ANONIZE2 protocol, so that neither Brave, nor any other entity, can correlate browsing page views with contributions." * Brave takes 5% of publisher contributions * "Generally speaking, Brave ads can be thought of as a two-sided marketplace between advertisers and users in which brands purchase BAT (an ERC20 token) to fuel their campaigns. As of writing, BAT is distributed as a rewarded everytime an ad notification is viewed. In the future, the Brave team is planning on integrating engagement-based rewards where each advertisement may have a specific budget that is distributed to viewers relative to some engagement metric, like how long they viewed the video." * From Token Tuesdays (15-10-2019): "BAT is said to be the first new asset supported in the upcoming release of MakerDAO’s Multi-Collateral Dai this November. For those unfamiliar, this means that BAT will be able to be staked as a proxy to take out a permissionless loan in the form of the DAI stablecoin. This is important as this mechanism introduces a means for BAT to be locked via smart contracts, reducing the circulating supply on the open market. While we recognize that the demand for BAT as a form of collateral is likely minimal, it’s important to recognize that out of all the possible assets to choose from, BAT was selected as one of the most viable ERC tokens on the market." Usage * From Token Tuesdays (15-10-2019): "In early 2019, Brave highlighted its recent success of a 5x year-over-year increase in monthly active users, reaching 5.5 million MAU by the end of 2018 (up from 1.1 million) with over 280,000 verified publishers. The browser has improved tremendously since its launch in 2017 with major product redesigns and additional use-cases for BAT. And it’s beginning to show. Website publishers have also seen a large increase in 2019. At the beginning of the year, Brave only had 9,700 websites using Brave as an advertising platform. Now, there are well over 33,000 websites leveraging the Brave Browser and its digital advertising campaigns. With this, website publishers have increased by 241% year-to-date (YTD). Given that crypto twitter (CT) is a large part of the crypto community, Brave was quick to introduce tipping and other features into the platform. In particular, Twitter saw tremendous publisher growth since its integration in May of 2019. With this, Brave has nearly eclipsed 28,000 unique Twitter publishers while reaching a 1,213% growth rate in less than 6 months. Other Brave publisher platforms include Youtube, Twitch, Reddit, Github, and Vimeo which have also seen impressive growth in the past year." Uphold Integration and user complaints * "More recently, a partnership (3-10-2019) with Uphold allowed users to take their rewards out of Brave and convert it to other digital assets. This was a big step forward as the previous version was unidirectional, meaning that users who earned BAT could only send it to other users on Brave." * After the integration some Reddit users complained (11-2019) about missing balances: "As a huge Brave fan, this disappoints me quite a bit. I mean look at the subreddit -- full of threads about disappearing tokens, publishers not receiving tips, broken withdrawals, etc. I hope everything gets figured out quickly, but this has been going on for weeks now. Maybe there's a lesson to be learned here ;) Give users full control of their browser wallet w/ private key. I was very hesitant to KYC, but decided to go through with it because of my publisher status. Lo and behold, after tipping my balance disappeared. No way of looking at the wallet on a block explorer so it makes it impossible for the end-users to investigate. Even more frustrating." Fork * There is a fork called Dissenter by the creators of Gab, that is looking at using BTC Lightning Network instead of BAT. Team, partnerships, investors etc. Team * Eich, Brendan; Founder, CEO * Bondy, Brian; co-founder, CTO, Previously: Khan Academy, Mozilla, Evernote * Zhu, Yan; Chief Information Security Officer, EFF Fellow. Previously: Yahoo, Tor Project, HTTPS Everywhere, Privacy Badger Advisors * Ankur Nandwani; Advisor, comes from Coinbase * Wilcox, Zooko; Advisor, if from of Zcash, Mojo Nation, DigiCash * Badros, Greg; Advisor, Angel Investor; previously: Facebook, Google Partners * Partnered with Dow Jones Media Group to experiment with a blockchain content delivery system. * As of 7-2019 on the partner & clients list of ZeppelinOS. They have done a security audit of Brave. * "More recently, a partnership with Uphold allowed users to take their rewards out of Brave and convert it to other digital assets. This was a big step forward as the previous version was unidirectional, meaning that users who earned BAT could only send it to other users on Brave." Investors * "funded by Founders Fund, Foundation Capital, Propel Venture Partners, Pantera Capital, DCG, Danhua Capital, and Huiyin Blockchain Venture among others.” Category:Coins/Tokens